NEW YORK CITY, March 24—“I come from Haiti, a country Donald Trump calls a ‘shithole.’ What he leaves out...is that Haiti was a rich and green island when Christopher Columbus arrived.” Thus spoke a Haitian immigrant at a fundraising dinner of over 100 guests. “But after the Spanish, French and U.S. came and went, Haiti looked totally different. Channeling Trump, maybe what I should have said was ‘after the shitheads came and went,’ Haiti was left in debt and had been stripped of its natural resources and left in misery. No resource was more affected than its forest cover: two-three percent of Haiti is green today; compare that to its nearest neighbors, the Dominican Republic at 28 percent and Cuba at 31 percent.”
Solidarity since 2010
A Haitian community group and a local church organized the fundraising dinner. It’s been eight years since the 2010 earthquake devastated the working class in Haiti. Every year since, we break bread and talk about building solidarity between workers in Haiti and those in the U.S. All funds raised go towards reforestation projects in small communities in Haiti.
Pointedly attacking the racist results of imperialism, we were a group of Black, white, Latin, Arab, U.S.-born and immigrant working-class people who mingled, sang inspiring songs in Creole, English and French, and laughed together, showing in word and deed how multi-racial and international unity can fight the bosses’ plans for our class.
More similar than different
One participant spoke about the current war in Yemen, supported financially by billions of U.S. arms dollars, and called on the audience to come out to oppose the visit of the Saudi Prince to get more money for bombs (see page 4). An Arab worker spoke poignantly about the cholera epidemic, showing how people from Yemen and Haiti, two countries in different parts of the world, are united in their common oppression by the profit system, whether by so-called “natural” disasters or expressly by war. “There is more that unites us than separates us,” he said, pledging an additional donation to fight the effects of deforestation in Haiti.
This event had a more political character than in the past, in part because of the reality of world events and the racist-in-chief in the U.S. White House, but also because of the influence of PLP’s ideas inside these organizations.
We have fought for our friends to understand why Haitian workers and other immigrants are forced to leave their homelands in an attempt to escape the super-exploitation of the capitalist system, whether looking for jobs or to get away from wars, as the imperialists fight among themselves to divide up the world for their own class interests.
We are clearly one working class, and should have no allegiance to anything but our class, our flag and the Party that represents it. On to May Day!

DETROIT, MI, March 15— The U.S. courts are investigating and charging United Auto Workers union (UAW) officials for accepting bribes from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV (FCA).
As the UAW constitutional convention approaches this June, the union mirrors the state of U.S. capitalism: corruption, declining power and influence. The situation is ripe for union misleaders and company bosses to indulge each other with bribes, luxuries, and money laundering.
The convention is supposed to set the tone for the 2019 contract talks with General Motors, Ford and FCA. But the main goal is to renew a 25 percent dues increase from 2014. Then, as now, the leadership used the contract talks with the auto bosses as the reason to keep feeding a strike fund that stands at more than $700 million. Another joke—a huge strike fund for a union that barely fights the bosses, let alone goes on strike. It is just more money to pad the misleaders’ lavish lifestyle.
Union bosses accept bribes from auto bosses
But it turns out that while UAW leaders were increasing our dues, they were also taking bribes from FCA bosses. Last July, federal prosecutors charged FCA executives with funneling $1.5 million in bribes to UAW officials in exchange for a contract that ultimately cut wages and benefits and sharply expanded the number of low-paid temporary workers. Like workers everywhere, auto workers are exploited more and more as the bosses get richer. Even more disgusting, the bribe money was taken from funds meant to train hourly workers. According to the indictments, the bribes were intended to keep UAW sellouts, “fat, dumb and happy.”
FCA’s chief negotiator, Alphons Iacobelli, and Jerome Durden, an FCA financial analyst, have both pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors. The money was going directly across the bargaining table to UAW VP for Fiat Chrysler, General Holiefield and his administrative assistant Keith Mickens. A new indictment against Mickens alleges that he and other UAW officials arranged for travel for Monica Morgan, Holiefield’s wife. Mickens also served as vice president of Leave the Light on Foundation, a phony charity used to launder money.
Morgan pleaded guilty to accepting $200,000 and UAW staffer Virdell King pleaded guilty to the improper use of a credit card to make tens of thousands of dollars of personal purchases and expensive gifts for other UAW officers. This included a $2,180 shotgun for UAW VP Norwood Jewell, who was forced into early retirement.
Expose ruling-class collusion
This scandal will keep growing. Iacobelli’s plea deal refers to a plan to make secret $50,000 payments to select UAW officers on the eve of the 2015 contract negotiations.
There was mass rank-and-file opposition to the 2015 contract. Workers are furious and threatening to reverse the dues increase and reject any initial contract settlement. Could there be a strike against FCA next year? The UAW leadership would allow a strike only to cover the stink of the current bribery scandal.
This corruption is the logical result of more than 50 years of pro-capitalist union leadership that has covered its treachery in racist “Buy American” flag-waving and being foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. UAW leaders, like the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership, work to ensure the bosses’ profits and keep a lid on the class struggle. Prosecuting a few crooks will not change that.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) aims to build an international communist movement, led by industrial workers, that can lead our class to power. By building an international PLP, we can plant the seeds for autoworkers worldwide to unite and take on the racist profit system.

This celebratory column is in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the world communist movement of the 20th century. We mainly examine its triumphs. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.
This article aims to tell the truth about Trotsky and his movement—a truth denied by all anticommunists as well as by all followers of the Trotsky cult.
Leon Trotsky (b. 1879) became a Marxist revolutionary during his youth; became a leading Bolshevik; and, during the last period of his life, the most influential anticommunist in the world. Today hundreds of Trotskyist groups worldwide continue to promote Trotsky’s brand of anticommunism masquerading as “real” communists.
During the 1905 revolution in Russian Trotsky led the Soviet, or revolutionary council, in St. Petersburg. After a period of exile to Siberia, Trotsky fled abroad. He joined the Menshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and strongly opposed Vladimir Lenin and Lenin’s Bolshevik branch.
In 1917 Trotsky returned to Russia. He joined a faction of Mensheviks who wanted the bourgeois, capitalist revolution that had deposed the Tsar, to continue to a socialist, working-class revolution. Trotsky recognized that only the Bolshevik Party, which he had long opposed, stood for such a revolution, so Trotsky negotiated a deal to join the Bolsheviks along with most of his faction and put Trotsky on the Bolshevik Central Committee.
During the Bolshevik Revolution and the following Civil War, Trotsky was one of the major Bolshevik leaders. He sabotaged the negotiations with the German Army, which led to the Germans occupying much more Russian territory. Trotsky led the military. He and Joseph Stalin clashed over how much to rely on officers from the Tsarist army who had rallied to the Bolsheviks—most of them temporarily. Trotsky favored the former Tsarist officers and Stalin wanted working class communists of the Red Army.
For a time after the war Trotsky remained an important Bolshevik leader. He and his supporters clashed with others in the Bolshevik leadership in the debates over policy during the Party Congresses and Conferences of the 1920s. An opposition formed against the policies advocated by Stalin and others. Trotsky, who was one of the leading oppositionists, promoted his own theory of “permanent revolution.” This concept basically meant that the USSR could only survive as a socialist state if it were helped by socialist regimes in industrialized countries. Otherwise, the revolution in Russia would “degenerate.” Trotsky had no solution for what to do if such revolutions did not take place.
Conspiracy
Even before Lenin died (January, 1924) Trotsky had formed a secret organization that conspired to take power in the USSR if—as Trotsky suspected —he failed to win the Party leadership once Lenin died. In order to work as secret Trotskyist agents inside the Party, Trotsky convinced some of his followers to cut all open ties with him and his supporters.
The Phony “Testament of Lenin”
In 1924, together with Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaia (who had temporarily joined the opposition) Trotsky forged the documents later called “Lenin’s Testament, “ which called for removing Stalin from his position as First Secretary of the Bolshevik Party. The “Testament” also praised Trotsky, though not too much—that would have been too obvious, since Lenin and Trotsky had been adversaries for a very long time and it had been Lenin who had insisted that Stalin become First Secretary.
In 1926 Trotsky published an article in which he insisted there was no such thing as “Lenin’s Testament.” But in the 1930s, when he was living in exile and leading a major conspiracy against the Stalin leadership, Trotsky “forgot” his denial and even claimed that Lenin had wanted to form a faction with him to get rid of Stalin. This forged “Testament” has been an important weapon of anticommunists and Trotskyists ever since. The evidence that it is a forgery was just discovered in 2003, after the original documents became available.
Trotsky and his public supporters were expelled for factionalism in 1927—they had held a number of counter-demonstrations at the 10th anniversary of the Revolution. Then Trotsky’s followers dishonestly claimed to “retract” their Trotskyist views and promised to follow the Party’s line in the future. They did this in order to continue their secret conspiracy within the Party and to recruit other Party members.
Trotsky’s Secret Conspiracy
Trotsky and his followers formed a secret “bloc” with other anti-Stalin conspiracies – the Rightists (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky) and others – and plotted the following crimes:
* Terrorism: plans to kill Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership.
* Sabotage against Soviet industry, mining, transportation.
* Plans to sabotage the Red Army in the event of war with any capitalist states.
* Kickbacks from German companies for sweetheart contracts with the Soviet government.
Trotsky conspired with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan—the most powerful and organized anticommunist forces in the world—to support these regimes, if they in turn would put the opposition into power in the USSR, or support them if the opposition managed to get into power by itself. Trotsky also conspired against the Soviet Union with French capitalists and the British Secret Service and British government.
In return, Trotsky promised to undo collective ownership of land and industry and permit foreign private investment. He promised to get rid of the Communist International, headquartered in Moscow, which helped communist parties around the world fight against their own governments and was especially hated by capitalist rulers everywhere.
Trotsky’s Writings
In his writings from exile Trotsky consistently lied about the Soviet Union and about the Stalin leadership. Trotsky had to lie! He was running a serious conspiracy against the Soviet government, and trying to make Stalin and the Bolsheviks look as bad as possible. He gained publicity and support by writing for capitalist magazines and newspapers. These publications were eager to print anything that made the USSR and the worldwide communist movement look “bad.” They paid Trotsky handsomely.
Mainly, Trotsky was lying to his own followers. They chose to believe whatever he said or wrote when he claimed that he, Trotsky, was the “real communist”, the “real successor to Lenin,” and that the Stalin leadership were criminal betrayers of the Revolution. Trotsky’s followers still “believe” him, “have faith” in him, despite mountains of evidence of Trotsky’s lies and collaboration with the Nazis, Japanese, and British and French imperialists.J
(Part Two will continue and conclude our discussion of Trotsky)

All the bosses’ media headlines, plus U.S. president Donald Trump’s claims, report the “lowest unemployment in 17 years,” at 4.1 percent in February. But, as the Shadowstats analysis firm proves, this is “nonsense reporting of the first order.”
The actual unemployment figure, counting ALL the jobless, is 21.8 percent. And even that number does not include:

• Young unemployed workers who, unable to find a job, join the military;
• Workers on welfare who want and need a job but are limited by a lack of daycare for their children;
• Millions of incarcerated workers and youth who once released from prison are out of the jobless count until they find employment;
• Millions of high school and college graduates seeking their first jobs and not counted as unemployed.

So even that more truthful 21.8 percent figure may easily be closer to 30 percent, a far cry from the rulers’ 4.1 percent.
Two factors mainly account for the huge undercount of unemployment. The government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes two jobless figures, U3 and U6. The U3, which grabs all the headlines, says it’s 4.1 percent. It counts those working part-time as “employed” even though they want full-time jobs but can’t find them. This only includes workers as unemployed who’ve been looking for work in the last four weeks. All others are not part of the 4.1 figure.
The BLS’s U6 count, which the media never headlines, actually rose to 8.2 percent and includes short-time “discouraged” workers out of work for the last six months but who stopped looking because there were no jobs to be had. All others, many who’ve been jobless for more than a year, are effectively eliminated from the unemployment figures and are defined by the BLS as “out of the labor force.” In January that number exceeded five million. And this movement of discouraged workers “out of the labor force” is accelerating.
Shadowstats points out another way that the 4.1 percent figure is “seriously flawed,” a game played by the BLS. The latter says that 313,000 jobs were added in February. But the BLS assumes that there was a net-positive addition from jobs created by new companies emerging in the economy, compared to jobs lost from companies going out of business (especially affected by hurricanes, floods and other disasters). But the BLS makes a “guesstimate” that the latter group’s payrolls are still the same, part of the “employed” workforce because many company closings are never reported. Thus the new-company jobs are part of an overstatement of any employment, which Shadowstats reports “easily exceeds 200,000 a month.” So much for the 313,000 figure.
Accompanying the jobless sham figures spread by the media is another one: “wages are rising.” But real average weekly earnings have declined for three quarters in a row, and, adjusted for inflation, are still BELOW the levels of the 1970s. On top of this is the fact that the BLS never accounts for all the wages LOST by millions of workers during the long period of unemployment in the recent Great Recession. Most workers will never recover those losses, even if wages were to rise slightly.
Racist unemployment
The bosses’ economists declare that a 5 percent unemployment rate means “full employment.” But obviously the working class is suffering vast unemployment. The latter is especially true for Black workers whose joblessness because of racist discrimination is at least double that of white workers and has been for centuries. The bosses reap billions in profits from this racism since they hold Black workers as a threat to white workers’ fear of losing their jobs, not to mention the lower wages paid to Black workers. Similar exploitation is true for Latin and millions of immigrant workers. All this divides and weakens the working class overall in its ability to unite to battle the bosses for all workers’ class demands.
The only time there has been official full employment in the U.S. was during World War II when 14 million workers joined or were drafted into the armed forces, ending the unemployment of the Great Depression. As the Progressive Labor Party maintains, the only solution to unemployment is to fight for communist revolution to rid the world of capitalism whose profits need an army of the unemployed to survive.